The Last Quarry (6 page)

My first instinct was, he wanted me to know (or anyway think) he was not armed.

Very tentatively, he stood there with a glass door slid open, halfway in, and—with a deference I didn’t figure was usual coming from this man—asked, “May I come in?”

I just looked at him.

When he didn’t get permission, he came in just the same, closing the door behind him, and was goddamn lucky he wasn’t dead by the time he turned and said, “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Mr. Quarry—I’m alone.”

Deference hadn’t worked, so he’d gone straight to hard-nosed.

He was moving cautiously my way, saying, “And if you kill me, you won’t know how I found you.”

I said nothing.

He nodded, as if I’d actually answered, then came over and pulled up a metal deck chair and sat at the edge of the Jacuzzi, nearby but not getting in my space.

“Don’t worry,” he said, patting the steamy air. His expression was soft, the grooves in his face at ease; but the money-color eyes were hard. “I didn’t waste my resources finding you to get...
even
, or some idiotic bullshit.”

I said nothing.

Sitting forward slightly in the chair, Green said, “Before you kill me—strangle me with that towel or whatever, I would—”

I showed him the nine millimeter from under the towel.

“There’s an elegant expression,” he said with admirable cool. “ž‘Don’t shit where you eat’....You live here, you manage this place, you have a
life
... why risk that with a death?...Hear me out.”

I said nothing, but I lowered the gun a fraction.

He put his hands on his chest. “I really do appreciate what you did for me, and my daughter. I’m well aware that those mob fagellehs would’ve killed the little smartass.”

I said, “Our business is over.”

He shrugged, a tiny smile forming, pleased he’d finally drawn me out into at least speaking. “Our
old
business is over, Mr. Quarry—I really do admire your resourcefulness, your abilities. Take DeWayne, for example.”

“No thanks.”

He shrugged in an admission of his subordinate’s imperfection. “DeWayne isn’t brilliant, but he’s dangerous. You handled him as if he were a helpless child.”

“A couple thousand DeWaynes have died in Iraq.”

The millionaire sighed, nodded, slumping in his metal chair. He shook his head. “And a goddamned shame.”

I shrugged with one shoulder. “We spilled more than that.”

Picking up on my attitude, and instantly getting over his sorrow for the lost lives in Iraq, Jonah Green said, “I’m sure you did. Which is why I won’t make the mistake of sending a boy to do a man’s work again....I’ve asked around about you, Mr. Quarry. By the way, is that a first name or a last name?”

“Probably.”

That stopped him for a beat, then he moved on briskly, almost cheerfully. “At any rate, I did some asking around....I do business in all kinds of circles, you know.”

“You talk in circles, too. What do you want, Mr. Green?”

He semi-ignored that question. “Seems there’s a certain freelance assassin who dropped out of sight, a few years ago. He had a reputation as the best man in a tough game, sort of a killer’s killer. He wasn’t mob, although sometimes he did jobs for—”

“I’m impressed you found me. Trouble is, now I have to move.”

I raised the gun.

Finally he got it, or maybe my raising the nine just let out the nervousness that had been inside him all along. His hands flew up, as if this were a stick-up.

He was half a second away from dead when he blurted, “I want you to do a job for me! Another job!”

My finger froze on the trigger.

This was a lot of money seated near me, begging me to let him give me some. I’m not a greedy man; but I’m not a monk, either.

I said, “I’m retired.”

He knew he’d made a dent and something lively came into the green eyes. “That would’ve been just before the stock market went to shit, wouldn’t it? How are your investments doing, Mr. Quarry? Did you get out before the dotcom bust?”

“I’m comfortable,” I said, which was funny in a way, because I was naked in a hot tub, so of course I was comfortable. On the other hand, I was holding a nine millimeter, thinking about killing this prick; so that part wasn’t so comfortable.

“So comfortable,” he said, unintentionally mirroring my thoughts in an openly Faustian manner, “that you wouldn’t come out of retirement for a quarter of a million dollars?”

Again I lowered the gun a hair. “...It’s not a political job, is it?”

“No! No, no, no.”

I sighed again, this time for my own benefit. “One last job is always a bad idea. Guys die trying to retire on one last job all the time.”

“But you are not just
any
guy, are you, Mr. Quarry?” He smiled; he had the same white feral teeth as his daughter, only his might have been false. The teeth part. The feral was real.

“No,” I admitted, “I’m not. What makes it worth a quarter mil?”

He answered with another question: “Do you have any reservations about taking out a woman?”

“I take women out all the time.”

“Not the way
I
mean.”

I smiled just a little. “Are you sure?”

We sat in my kitchen.

Jonah Green already knew the lay of my land, so there was no harm in taking him across the road to the A-frame cottage...no further harm, anyway. Plus, I was tired of negotiating with my dick hanging out. Water’s a bad place to hold a serious conversation, at least your half of it; the other guy can always make his point by kicking something electrical in—I know, because I’ve been that guy.

So now we were both dressed. The Mr. Coffee was on, and we were exploring the job. The only step remaining was me deciding to do the thing or not—the money required no further discussion.

A captain of industry through and through, Jonah Green had a folder of information, including half a dozen photos. The woman in the photos—all candid, surveillance-type—was in her early thirties, attractive but not making the most of it, her hair up, with reading glasses on in some of the shots.

She did not look like a likely contract-murder
victim, but you never know. Karen Silkwood didn’t look like much, either (no, I didn’t do that one).

He was handing me across several information-crammed sheets. “Here’s everything you need to know about the woman—work and home addresses, personal habits and friends, everything.”

I glanced up at him. “Time frame?”

Green blinked. “Say again? I don’t follow.”

“You need her dead—I get that.
When
do you need her dead?”

He sat forward; for the first time the talk took on a truly conspiratorial feel. “In two months, her being alive is...a bad thing for me.” He sighed, and something that might have been regret, real or feigned, came into his expression and his voice. “Understand, Mr. Quarry, she didn’t do anything to deserve—”

I cut him off with a traffic-cop palm. “Mr. Green...you’re a powerful guy. You’ve decided you need her dead. That means she’s already dead.”

His forehead and eyes tightened. “I...now I really don’t follow....”

Tossing the pictures on the table, I said, “She’s already dead—she just doesn’t know it yet. My doing the job is...a detail.”

That made the millionaire slightly ill at ease, and he said, maybe for his own peace of mind, “Well, it’s strictly a matter of business—nothing personal. She’s a nice woman, I’m sure—”

“Nice women,” I interrupted, “don’t make themselves the targets of men like you, who aren’t nice.”

Blood drained from his face, but he said nothing. Hard to get indignant when the guy you’re hiring to kill somebody points out that you’re not Mr. Wonderful.

I gestured with the information sheets.

“This stuff is fine,” I said. “But understand, Mr. Green, I have to watch her a while, anyway. A few days, at least.”

He frowned, shaking his head, pointing to the info sheets. “But...I’ve got all her patterns recorded, already...library...apartment....”

“How old is the information? A P.I. gathered this. When?”

The frown deepened into irritation, as if I had questioned his professionalism. “I tell you, it’s fresh!”

“
How
fresh?”

Now he sounded defensive, and did a Rodney Dangerfield tug of his jogging-suit collar. “A month, six weeks at the outside.”

I shook my head. “I have to watch her a while. Patterns change. Shift.” I sat forward. “Mr. Green, the elimination side is only part of the process—it starts with surveillance. Otherwise the cops find me. And if they find me, they find you.”

In the old days, the guy hiring me wouldn’t have
been sitting across from me; it would have been the Broker or someone like him.

Jonah Green let out a sigh worthy of a Christian martyr. “Fine.” His eyebrows rose and he shook a finger. “But
two months
, and she’s a problem, Mr. Quarry.”

“I heard that the first time.”

He tasted the inside of his mouth and didn’t seem to like it much. “There’s, uh...one other thing. It’s a part of why your fee is so generous.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“It’s...well, it’s got to be an accident.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Say again?”

He gestured with both hands, obviously finding it distasteful to have to discuss this. “You know...slip and fall in the tub, brakes go out, hell,
I
don’t know... that’s
your
department!”

I looked at him for a while.

He was getting uneasy by the time I said, “I don’t usually do ‘accidents.’ž”

Irritably, he said, “For a quarter mil, make an exception—you mind if I smoke?”

“Take it outside.”

Dusk had settled on us as we stood on the deck, looking out on Sylvan Lake’s still frozen expanse; you couldn’t see Harry and Louis’s hole at all from here.

The millionaire leaned on the deck rail, gazing out
at the stark, serene landscape, his plumes of breath alternating with exhales of tobacco smoke. I was standing there, arms folded, looking at my prospective employer, wondering if I should take the job or go out there and drop another one in that hole.

“Beautiful,” Green said, shaking his head admiringly. “Beautiful goddamn country, up here. I can see why you like it.”

“I’ll be moving on soon,” I said. “You could probably buy this cottage from the guy who owns the lodge.”

Green flicked his gaze my way.

I continued: “Of course, if you do move in, for a summer home? Every time you look out at this lovely lake, you’ll be looking at those numbnuts who grabbed your kid.”

He wasn’t studying the lake, anymore; his eyes were on me. “Why moving on?”

“You know where I live, Mr. Green.” I shrugged and smiled. “Even if I
do
do this job, I’m out of here.”

Eyes narrowed to slits, Green said, “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Quarry. I swear to you I was discreet about finding you. I used a number of people, and no single investigator was—”

“Sure. Fine.”

Green sighed. “
Will
you do the job?”

I nodded.

Relief flooded his features. “How do I make my payment?”

“I’ll give you the offshore banking info. When $125
K
hits the account, I go to work. When I deliver, put the rest in.”

Green frowned. “You trust me to do that?”

“Sure.” I grinned at him. “I’m kinda my own collection agency.”

He didn’t allow himself to be frightened by that; instead he again stared out at the hauntingly beautiful lake.

For the first time, I heard a genuine melancholy in the mogul’s voice. “She’s...she’s
already
dead.”

I nodded. “It just hasn’t made the obits yet.... Coffee?”

The Homewood Library seemed modern to me, but only because of my age—it dated to the ’70s and you walked into a big high-ceilinged area with wide steps leading up to a surrounding second floor that was like a landing that got out of hand.

The place was all cheerful oranges and greens and yellows, dotted with oppressively cheerful posters encouraging reading and featuring lots of Asian and black faces, though everybody I saw in there was white. What had once been open and spacious was now a little cluttered, with an area obviously intended for seating given over to portable bookcases of
NEW RELEASES
and
AUDIOS
, and various computer stations.

It didn’t remind me much of the austere churchlike libraries of my youth—hardwood floors and institutional green walls and endless shelves of anonymous dustjacket-less books overseen by cold-eyed old-maid librarians with their hair in gray buns and their bodies in gray dresses that a nun would’ve considered needlessly unflattering.

And Janet Wright didn’t remind me of those old-maid librarians, either, though her white blouse and
black skirt were a little stark, at that. Her dark blonde hair was pinned up (though not in a bun), attractive stray curls of it struggling free to give her heart-shaped face unbidden decorative touches. Her reading glasses were wireframe and merely serviceable, like the touches of lipstick and eyeliner that appeared to be her only makeup. She seemed to have a nice shape, too, though her wardrobe played it down.

But there was no getting away from that nice, creamy complexion and eyes so brown they almost looked black from a distance, and she had a very nice smile that she flashed generously at the grade-school kids—third-graders?—who were sitting on the floor in the Children’s Section staring up adoringly at her, lost in the story she was reading...a book called
The Glass Doorknob
, something or other about a sock monkey.

I was impressed—not one of these kids was fidgeting or squirming or looking to need their Ritalin dosage, even if their laughter did seem unnecessarily shrill. Of course, eight kids who were spending their Friday after-school time at the library probably weren’t the type to be fussy; plus, the six girls probably wanted to be Janet Wright when they grew up, and the two boys probably wanted to marry her when they did (although right now they had no idea why).

As she sat in the chair, her audience gathered
around like little Indians, it was obvious she related well to the tykes, stopping to ask them questions, involving them, really looking at them and even listening to their answers.